Medical facilities, such as hospitals, nursing homes or the like, often have a centralized location such as a pharmacy department or materials management department within the facility to coordinate the dispensing of drugs or medical supplies to remote supply storage areas and patients within the medical facility. The departments utilizing medications and medical supplies in such facilities have long been burdened with the increasingly complex record keeping and inventory management that results from caring for hundreds, if not thousands, of patients every day. Various methods have been employed to assist a centralized pharmacy or other centralized medical supply departments with maintaining accurate records while attempting to reduce the burden of managing all of the information associated with the distribution of medications and medical supplies. The responsibilities of the centralized supply include: filling individual patient prescriptions on a daily basis; administration of drugs using the five rights: right drug, right patient, right dose, right time and right route; dispensing medical supplies to patients; maintaining sufficient inventory of each drug or medical supply so as to have sufficient quantities on hand; tracking of drug interactions to prevent a patient from being given a drug that has adverse affects when combined with other drugs; accounting for the purchase of medications and medical supplies for use in the facility; accounting associated with dispensing of medications and medical supplies to individual patients; tracking of medication expiration dates to rid inventories of expired medications; and tracking of drug lot numbers, for example, in the event of a recall of a particular drug or drug lot number.
Medical facilities typically dispense medications in one of three modes: centralized, decentralized, or a hybrid of partial decentralization. In facilities that are partly or fully decentralized, one function of the centralized pharmacy or materials management department is to restock various inventory locations (e.g., nurses' stations, unit-based supply cabinets, satellite pharmacies, or off-site facilities in a network, etc.) with the quantity and types of medications and medical supplies to be dispensed by the decentralized locations on a daily basis.
The need for storage locations in medical facilities remote from the centralized storage location stems from the need to be able to quickly and conveniently dispense medications and medical supplies (whether controlled or uncontrolled) to patients. To be able to dispense, there should be adequate supplies of the medications and medical supplies in the remote storage locations. To maintain the proper level of medications and medical supplies, accurate inventory control is highly desirable. The content of these storage locations varies depending upon the medical procedures practiced in the area where the storage location is situated. For example, a storage location near an emergency room may be stocked in a manner different from a storage location next to a surgical suite. Nevertheless, it is desirable to provide adequate supplies of all the required medications and medical supplies. It is also desirable to ensure that sufficient supplies are maintained at the decentralized and centralized storage locations without overstocking, because overstocking may increase the cost of inventory by requiring more items to be maintained in inventory than are actually needed. Overstocking of inventory may also result in waste through spoilage of unused supplies. Excessive restocking of locations may also be demanding on the facility's staff who devote more of their time to monitor the storage locations to ensure that sufficient supplies are available.
A variety of systems have been developed to track/monitor, and thus control, inventory. More recently, storage areas are being provided with dispensing carts or cabinets having computer processors for recording removal of medications or medical supplies from the dispensing cabinets. These carts or cabinets commonly include secured drawers having locked medication compartments, and include computers. The computer control systems commonly provide for limited access by selected medical personnel to such carts and cabinets and limited access to specific drawers or locations therein in response to entry of information into the computer. The computer control system creates inventory information for use by medical staff to ensure the continuity of the inventory in the carts or cabinets.
One emerging technology in the area of inventory tracking/monitoring and/or control systems is radio frequency identification (RFID) technology whereby RFID transponder tags may be affixed to units of a product (and, if so desired, the carts or cabinets themselves) to wirelessly track/monitor those units. Although the use of RFID technology may improve performance of such systems, current solutions do not ensure repeatable, strict placement of RFID tags with respect to one another and one or more RF reader antennas with which those tags are configured to communicate. And as such, current solutions are more likely to suffer from failures of the system to accurately monitor/track one or more tags due to damage to one or more tags, drawbacks associated with handling the units to which the tags are affixed (e.g., inability to effectively and efficiently separate tags and the units to which those tags are affixed) and/or the inability to provide a user friendly means to place RF tags within the RF antenna read field).